At Paris Photo 2026, TINTERA Gallery (Booth C18) presents works by the late French artist Bernard Guillot alongside leading Egyptian artists Nermine Hammam and Ibrahim Ahmed, both making their Paris Photo debut.

Bernard Guillot’s (1950–2021) work is represented by two deeply personal bodies of work rooted in his decades-long relationship with Cairo. City of the Dead / Cité des Morts (1977–2017), created over forty years, traces his sustained engagement with Cairo’s historic necropolis, where domestic life unfolds among tombs and mausoleums. Through long exposures, dramatic contrasts of light and shadow, and occasional hand-painted interventions, Guillot moves between documentary observation and a more dreamlike, subjective vision. Hotel Maffet Astoria similarly chronicles a place that became inseparable from his own life: the downtown pension where he lived from 1979 until its closure in 2003, as its last inhabitant. Photographing its rooms, transient guests and traces of daily life over more than two decades, Guillot described these works as "a testimony of a place, of myself, of time." Together, the two series form an intimate visual archive of a changing Cairo, shaped as much by memory and personal experience as by the places themselves. Guillot’s work is held in the collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, including a group of his Cairo photographs from 1977.

Nermine Hammam (b. 1967), is represented by works from A’aru and Eschaton, two series that draw on archival and vernacular photography to explore collective memory, identity and social transformation in Egypt. In A’aru (2022), named after the ancient Egyptian concept of the afterlife, Hammam digitally manipulates, hand-colours and layers black-and-white vernacular photographs taken on the beaches of Alexandria, transforming familiar scenes into dreamlike, totemic images that evoke the archetypal, the unconscious and the possibility of transformation. In Eschaton (2009–2013), the beach becomes a stage on which shifting ideas of identity, masculinity and self-presentation are played out. The works presented at Paris Photo depict a range of male figures from soldiers to sunbathers whose gestures move between performance, vulnerability and self- conscious display. Through her characteristic layering and intervention, Hammam transforms these everyday encounters into images in which personal and collective histories, past and present, continually overlap.

Ibrahim Ahmed (b. 1984), presents works from I never revealed myself to them (2016–ongoing), an expansive and evolving body of work through which the artist examines masculinity, its representations, and the social structures that shape it. In you can’t recognise what you don't know (2020), Ahmed cuts, layers, and reconstructs the male body to question the performative nature of masculinity. In quickly but carefully cross to the other side and some parts seem forgotten, he weaves found photographs from his father’s family albums together with self-portraits, creating patchwork-like collages in which personal histories are fragmented and reassembled. Conceived as an evolving visual diary, I never revealed myself to them uses the artist’s own body and family archive to navigate inherited ideas of manhood, identity and belonging, while confronting the gaps, absences and forgotten memories within personal history.

While distinct in approach, the three artists share a commitment to expanding photography beyond its documentary function, using memory, imagination and material intervention to explore how images—and the histories they carry—are preserved, transformed and reimagined.